The opening of David F. Sandberg’s Until Dawn will feel eerily familiar even to those who haven’t played the 2015 vivdeo game of the same name that it’s based on. The camera floats upward, giving us a god’s eye view of a car traveling along a straight road, surrounded by a thick forest. It carries a group of young friends who, after receiving cryptic directions from the unsettling attendant of a remote gas station, wind up at a mysterious house in the middle of the woods where a night of unimaginable horror awaits them.

Until Dawn’s story, as written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, is far from original and its attempts to graft deeper meanings about grief and trauma on to it—the group is led by Clover (Ella Rubin), who’s on a mission to track down her missing sister—are hackneyed. Clover’s...